Welcome to the Joy Lab podcast, where we help you uncover and foster your most joyful self. Your hosts, Dr. Henry Emmons and Dr. Aimee Prasek, bring you the ideal mix of soulful and scientifically sound tools to spark your joy, even when it feels dark. When you're ready to experiment with more joy, combine this podcast with the full Joy Lab program over at JoyLab.coach . Hello, I'm Henry Emmons, and welcome to Joy Lab. And I'm Aimee Prasek.
Here at Joy Lab we infuse science with soul to help you build your resilience and uncover your joy. And today, in light of Father's Day, we are talking about how father's mental health can impact young kids. So there was a recent study that looked at this using a longitudinal design. They used a prospective 3D birth cohort data set. Which essentially collected data from like mom, dad, kid triads at the kid's birth. And then again, when the kid was six to eight years of age.
And to just broadly describe the findings here, the researchers found that dads who reported more depressive symptoms, though still in a mild category, had kids with fewer behavioral difficulties. Oh, there's a paradox. Yes, yes. Curious paradox, to reference, another of our episodes, and another piece of, the findings here that was surprising. Dads with, I think anyway, dads with greater but still mild depression or anxiety had kids with higher IQs. I just have to sit with this.
It's so powerful. The researchers did control for some variables that I think are important as well, like maternal mental health, parental education, parenting perceptions, paternal ratings of the quality of the marriage. So they pulled out those factors to identify this really, these really interesting associations between, a dad's mild depression and anxiety and essentially these benefits for kids.
So I'll give a right away an important conclusion here is that all of you fathers out there can see this as evidence that acknowledging struggles with mental health, as these fathers did for this study, it's not damaging to children. It opens up the door to your own healing and sharing your experiences, your struggles can actually benefit your family. So maybe I'm momsplaining here. Which is a valuable thing. Is that a thing? I don't know. I think it's better than mansplaining.
But, Henry, as a father, what's your initial takeaway here? Maybe as it relates to your experience as a father. Well, I'm going to take some liberties since this is our Father's Day broadcast... father. I'm going to talk about my sons. So Eric and Mark, if you're listening, you're welcome. On Father's Day, you can call me and thank me that when you were young, I was a little bit anxious and maybe even a little bit depressed.
I didn't realize it at the time, but I think I helped you become smarter and emotionally healthier. Yeah. So, I find this paper to be super interesting. Because, haven't we always believed that, in order for us as parents to be good role models, we need to be strong, always positive, stable, healthy, well balanced.
You know, I think about the term neurotic, which maybe isn't used as much today, but it's often used to describe this tendency to be mildly anxious or depressed, and clearly there's a negative connotation to it. You know, if I say I'm neurotic, it's basically shorthand for I'm overly emotional, I'm too sensitive, or I'm a mess. And so, especially if we're parents, we think we shouldn't be like this. What kind of model are we giving our kids? Well, according to this study, a pretty good one.
So, we have said before on our podcast that being a little bit stressed is actually not a bad thing. In fact, it might be a very good thing. At least it seems to be good for the brain to occasionally be mildly stressed. And then, to have to go through the work or the process to resolve whatever is causing that mild stress. And I think this study suggests that not only is it good for your brain to go through these things, it might even be good for those around us and specifically for our kids.
Yeah, I, I think it's such a good point too, about what we think strong looks like. I want to push into that a little bit. You know, I have to be strong for my kids, as you said, it's a common thought. But strength is really only demonstrated in the face of struggle, right? Like something hard or strong amidst it, that's resilience. But I think, as you're saying, that kind of strength gets interpreted or modeled as unemotional. So we blunt our emotions. Maybe we don't cry in front of our kids.
We hold it in. So instead of strength, we're modeling something very confusing to kids. Something hard happens and they see it. They know. Those little monsters know. You can't get anything past them. I'm kidding. You're not monsters. Um, but you know, they know if someone died or someone lost their job or their parents are getting a divorce or they feel that stress. So something stressful happens.
And then in an effort to show strength, I think it's common to model a reaction that is inconsistent with the situation. And that's a powerful signal to kids, right? Here's how to react when something bad happens. When something sad happens, shove it down, put on a happy face, don't talk about it, don't cry. And this really gets to me, as you can see, if you're on YouTube, getting a little heated.
Because this is how I grew up and how at least several generations up from my parents grew up as well. And it was absolutely destructive. We're not protecting our kids from anything by hiding these natural expressions of being alive. I'll give an example just this weekend. I got some hard news about someone I love who is not doing well. And I started crying and my husband and daughter were right there with me and all our dogs and our chickens was an entire audience.
But, um, my daughter says to this audience of chickens and humans, mom's crying. And she said it so matter of fact to like, everyone let's pay attention to what's happening right now. Um, and she, she came over to me and just put her arms around me. And then after a bit, she said, I know how to make you feel better. And then she told me a knock knock joke. Which I feel like I want to tell now. So, Henry, knock knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow. Interrupting cow who? interrupted.
That's pretty good. I like It made me laugh! You can always get me with a knock-knock joke. And like at her age or any age, right, it was a helpful, comforting strategy, quite honestly. I mean, it's not always the best thing to do to tell a knock knock joke. Um, but, you know. And I'm not saying that I do this right at all, you know, all the time either. But I'm, I'm grateful I've sort of broken that, that curse of our family, quite honestly.
She's learning how to be there for people during hard stuff. How to be with those emotions in her too, not just seeing that outside. She can empathize, she listens, and to see how it can be worked through as well. Something like sadness shifts and transforms. You know, I was crying and then we're laughing and then we're kind of coming back to talking. Uh, these are the skills that kids need.
So, back on track here, related, I want to highlight again that this study collected self-reported experiences and symptoms that fathers communicated. So, to me, that says something about the power of opening up about how we're feeling. So, these dads saw depression and anxiety within themselves, they had that awareness, and then they communicated it. I think that's really important.
And I think we're still caught in this stigma, maybe particularly for men, that depression and anxiety are weaknesses, and it is just a lie. It was a lie that snagged my dad and really all the dads in his family and the moms, pretty much everybody up the family tree, quite honestly. And I think this study offers really valuable insight here, right?
In this context, these fathers shared how they were feeling, what was happening in their inner world, and then in that, something good happened around them, right? Their kids benefited from it. I think that's so beautiful. And we know, we know this, stuffing our feelings down, putting on a face, pretending to be something or someone we're not, it's harmful.
And so here's an invitation to not hide those human experiences from those closest to us, you know, to not let anxiety and depression fester in the darkness, to create a rot that carries down the trunk of the whole tree. And that's not a responsibility, like you have to tell your family everything about your inner life, but it's an invitation to let them know who you are and to be with you. And then in that space, I think healing can happen, even generational healing.
Yes, yeah, I think we're offering really a good model for our kids when we're open about what we're experiencing and not shutting it down. And we're showing them that, you know, it's okay to struggle from time to time. It's okay to have feelings that we don't like. And then, if we're able to find ways to actually deal with those emotions, you know, we can ride them out until they pass or we can face them honestly and directly.
We can look to the source of those feelings to see is there something I can do about it. That's really good, sophisticated, even though simple, modeling that those kids can really use. I, I do want to emphasize that this study showed benefit for mild symptoms of anxiety and depression, not severe, not incapacitating, and not what we might call clinical depression. So again, just a very quick definition of what is clinical depression.
Well, the definition is kind of fuzzy in my view, but I think that it is generally meant for folks whose ability to function has really been impacted by their mood. So for example, they can't really perform their duties at their job or in their relationships or as a parent or a homemaker or whatever it is. If it's gone that far that you're just unable to do what you need to do in some really important aspect of your life, it's important to get help for that.
Nothing good is going to come for you or your kids if you don't address it. So in addition to the modeling that we're talking about, I think there's something else that this study is suggesting about being a good father. And it's what they call parental attunement. Here's what I think that means. And I don't actually know for sure, so Aimee, you can chime in if you have a different idea.
But what I think it means is that if your emotions are a bit charged, like there's a little bit of intensity there, it's got your attention, well, then you may be more attuned and more sensitive in general to what's going on around you, including what your kids, what's going on with them and what they might need. It's almost like it, it wakes you up a little bit. And it, it, it's sort of like you're more alive in some way.
And maybe the rawness of those emotions also, and I think of this for men, and being one who can get caught up in my head, that the emotions take you out of your head and bring you into your body or maybe into your heart. And if, if you can learn to do that, to let that happen, it's a, an incredibly important skill and an important thing to model. You cannot do that if you are numb to your own emotions. You also cannot do that if you are overwhelmed by your emotions.
So it's somewhere in the middle, that sweet spot that I think was happening in the study with the mild symptoms that they talked about, where you can be tuned in to both your emotions and your kids. Yeah. And then, you know, maybe you work a little harder to try to make things right for them. So, here's, here's an example that I can remember from when my kids were little.
One of the biggest, most stressful things for me when they were young was that I just wanted to protect them from anything that might cause them emotional distress. I mean, literally, if they were in emotional pain, so was I. It just hurt to see that. Now, one of my, I think, the most helpful things of my parenting was that I eventually learned to live with that and not try so hard to keep them from these emotional hurts, the day to day ones. And I'm so glad that I did.
I think that that's one of the things this study is pointing toward. We all need to learn to deal with mild feelings of anxiety or depression. Because it is not neurotic to have these feelings. It is human. And when we fathers have the courage to show our humanness, our vulnerability to our kids they soak it up. Those are lessons that they get without us having to tell them that these are lessons. So, back to my own sons for a minute.
If you're listening, I want you to know how proud I am that both of you are able to have all of your emotions and not hide them and not be ashamed of them, but to be open, vulnerable, deeply feeling young man. Please pass that on to the next generation. That's a blessing for the next generation, for sure.. So as we cloSe, I want to share some wisdom from Lin Manuel Miranda, the brilliant musician. One of the minds behind masterpieces like Hamilton and Encanto.
We even named one of our chickens Bruno after our our family's love for the movie, but we won't talk about Bruno today. Uh, so here's what Miranda had to say. I think it says something about the role fathers, all of us can play in the lives of the next generations. " Legacy. What is legacy? It's planting seeds in the garden you won't get to see." Thank you for listening to the Joy Lab podcast. If you enjoy today's show, visit JoyLab.coach to learn more about the full Joy Lab program.
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